Currently, when uploading an image, such as a picture or illustration saved in a computer readable format (e.g., jpg, giff, bmp, png, tiff), to a product design website or other electronic medium (e.g., e-mail, ftp server), the receiving systems do not provide production information on the image received. These systems, as utilized in the product design industry, are dumb systems, configured only to receive images with little or no comment or concern as to the properties or characteristics of the received images.
While certain configurator systems for product design websites (such as those used by Café Press, Zazzle, Spreadshirt, and Shutterfly) allow the uploading of graphics, no information is provided at the time of upload regarding the properties of the graphics and usability of the graphics in production of the desired products. When a designer then selects the graphic for use, the system will use the size of the original upload. For example if a file is small in size, such as a 52 kb image in 72 dpi, the resulting image displayed will be quite small. If the designer wishes to increase the size of the image by selecting the edit arrow and extending the size of the image, an error message will be displayed. This message notes that if the image is made larger it will not meet minimum print standards, and if images are not adjusted back to original size they may be blurry or pixilated.
While notifications to the user, in form of error messages or other notification means, are commonplace, they do nothing to correct the failings identified by these systems. As image correction can be a complicated problem, one that is out of the realm of many computer users, having a system simply identify that an image is not usable for the desired purpose does little to instruct or assist the user in getting the image into appropriate form for use by the system. As such, potential customers may be dissuaded or altogether incapable of utilizing the systems currently available as the users may lack the ability to correct errors or other problems with the images in order to make the image appropriate for use by the system.
Therefore, there is need in the art for a graphics correction engine capable of testing the quality of images or other multimedia content and automatically performing corrections and conversions on the images or other multimedia content. These and other features and advantages of the present invention will be explained and will become obvious to one skilled in the art through the summary of the invention that follows.